Travels without a moral compass

A racy woman dispirits

12:00AM GMT 23 Nov 1996

IT IS RARE to find a picaresque novel whose protagonist is female, because a woman is likely to find it more difficult to travel around a world full of predatory men with the insouciance customary in this genre. But Lilian Faschinger's heroine has no such problem. Instead of seeking to deflect male lust, Magdalena goes out of her way to provoke it. When she leaves home, her entire wardrobe consists of a black leather jumpsuit, a lacy body-stocking and a nun's habit.

These titillating outfits attract a string of dubious men. In the course of her travels, Magdalena cohabits with a sensation-hungry Frisian, an alcoholic Ukranian, a promiscuous flamenco dancer, a vampire, a homosexual Jehovah's Witness, a masochistic baron and a chronically dissatisfied swimming instructor. When her partners disappoint or annoy her, Magdalena simply murders them.

But she also seeks absolution. The novel takes the form of her confession to an Austrian priest, whom she has abducted for this purpose. Bound and gagged, he falls prey to the sinner's charms and the reader is clearly expected to do the same. Yet it is difficult to feel the attraction of a character who lacks any emotional dimension.

Magdalena retreats from the horrors she describes into trivia

Magdalena's narrative, like Tristram Shandy's, is distinguished by its digressions. But while Shandy's mental excursions plunge into the complex depths of our existence, Magdalena retreats from the horrors she describes into trivia. Her witty disquisitions upon ice palaces or Austrian patisserie are entertaining. But that is all they are. We are not surprised that Magdalena is drawn to a statue of the Virgin Mary, whose head is averted, her eyes "turned sideways toward something which was peripheral but which was clearly very interesting to her". Magdalena's cultivation of the marginal and the irrelevant makes her story relentlessly superficial.

Ultimately, however, pure superficiality is not very interesting. There is a sense in which this kind of comedy must confine itself to the surface of life, but in a way that suggests the depths beneath. This novel resolutely excludes shadow and mystery, drains violence of its horror, and produces a world which is amoral and one-dimensional, and, as such, unsatisfying.